I unhooked my bra and paused to consider - as i always do at the
unhooking-my-bra point in a relationship - how i had come to be
with this particular man, in this particular place, at this
particular time.

In this particular case, the man in question had a gentle
european accent and at least fifty years seniority over my tender
twenty-three. He sat in the corner of my apartment-bedroom, in
the comfy armchair i'd inherited from my grandfather. When i say
"inherited", Gramps hadn't died, exactly, but he had moved north
to enjoy some sunshine, as the twilight of his life began. The
chair was too big and too old-fashioned to fit in up north, where
Matures like my Gramps spend all their time trying to forget that
they are really, really old, and plushly upholstered chairs from
an era gone by make that sort of mindtrick difficult.

He suited the chair, this man in my room, his accent silent for
the moment, his arms resting on his knees, hands knitted loosely
together and hanging between his thighs, watching me disrobe for
him.

He was the sort of man who wouldn't fit in up north, either. He
didn't seem the sort to be into denial.

It occurred to me right then that he would be about the same age
as my quite-into-denial-thank-you-very-much grandfather. Gramps'
hair was almost all gone, though - no denying that! - and this
man still had thickish hair, if somewhat receding from each
temple, in the european manner. It was that head of hair that
made him look younger than Gramps, which was just as well. It
would have been a bit creepy to have felt like i was getting all
naked and frisky for a man old enough to have dandled me on his
knee when i was but a wee bairn in a cotton napkin.

But, in reality, that was exactly what i was doing: preparing
myself for sex with a man whose children would have to be as old
as my parents.

Not that there's anything unusual in such an arrangement, of
course: younger girl, older gent is quite the fashion. It's all
about spring, autumn; innocence, experience; enthusiasm, wisdom;
flexibility, technique.

Actually it's not about fashion at all. It's a simple fact of
life. So simple, it's a story that can be told in numbers.

We all knew those numbers, despite there being lots of them,
parading across our newsmedia with a deadening frequency. The
most salient of all those figures - in the room where i was
taking off my clothes - was the blunt numerical fact that more
than seventy percent of the population was older than sixty, and
fewer than ten percent was younger than thirty...

After a while, you can convince yourself that it's not only
normal, but somehow natural to be having sex with someone your
grandfather's age.

In fact, it was so normal for me that this would be the twelfth
time i'd been in a relationship with someone too old to raise an
erection, let alone achieve penetration.

Which is a real pity, because i'm a huge fan of
penetration.

Huge.

I wish there was more of it to go around.

But nowadays odds are while a girl will be more likely to find
herself with someone equipped with decades and decades of
experience in how to pleasure a woman, all that wisdom will have
outlasted his ability to apply it firsthand.

So we do this instead.

I unslung my bra straps from my shoulders and peeled the lycra
cups off of my boobs, first left, then right. Very methodical. I
try to be as detached and scientific about this sort of sex as
possible. I like to think to myself that the sessions i have with
Matures are training, for when i finally settle down with a
Breeder, so i approach each session like a scientist, gathering
data.

My nipples, however, are on their own agenda, and are fully erect
and expecting some nuzzling, even before they're freed into the
cool, late afternoon air of my bedroom.

"Nice," the old man in the Gramps chair murmured in that accent
of his. "You have very lovely nipples."

I smiled as coquettishly as i could, my scientist act totally
blown, and thanked him for the compliment. I switched from
scientist to sex kitten, stretching in as feline a way as i could
manage. This gave what i knew (from the advice and tutelage of
various previous Matures) to be a visually pleasing elongation to
my slender frame, and a flattering elevation to my
meagre-but-pert breasts.

Matures really, really enjoy elongation and elevation in a woman,
on account of how the women their age - the post-sexual women
they generally ignore in favour of we younger lasses - are
universally dumpy and droopy.

Their minds are perfectly clear and functional, these Matures,
thanks to the wonders of medical science, and their bodies are
disease free. Medical science cannot, however, do anything about
the slow degeneration of skin, muscles, tissues, tendons.

It seems a cruel irony that Matures are just as mentally with it
as we are, but that they're trapped in crumbling bodies.

I often wonder to myself if Matures would be quite as decrepit
physically if they cycled, the way we younger folks routinely do.
Some physical exercise would have to be good for them, in place
of taking the horsetrams to get about everywhere as they
do.

But you hardly ever see a Mature on a bike. Not even the
pneumatically enhanced, servo-assisted robo-bikes designed to
compensate for arthritic joints and the general loss of
muscletone that comes with senescence.

Matures just seem to hate bikes.

Which was why it was so strange that the first time i met this
man, Arno, i discovered he knew so much about bikes.

It was freaky.

I'd had a terrible commute. I'd been changing lanes on the
veloway when, without any warning, my bike's gears shredded
themselves at eighty kay as i clicked down to pass a slow-moving
jerk with earphones in.

By the time i'd safely coasted through oblivious and abusive
traffic to the verge, the chain was in tatters, and i'd lost a
considerable amount of paint, too, from where that unruly chain
had flailed about.

I stood in the gravel and took out my iPocket, to look around for
the nearest mechanic. I found one not too far from where i was
standing, but then i felt something trickling down my leg.
Somehow i had torn a gash in my thigh in all the chain-flailing
excitement, and i was bleeding in the sort of way that makes you
want to get home right now and worry about everything that's not
bleeding later.

So i pushed and carried my broken bike the last two kilometres
home.

No-one stopped to help. A few times i heard the ticking of a bike
coasting up behind me, dropping out of the flow, but when they
saw the blood running down my leg like a disastrously unexpected
period, there was the ka-chunk of the crank being re-engaged, and
yet another would-be hero swished past me without even a
backwards glance.

You'd think that a damsel in distress would be an opportunity too
good to pass up in these days of penetration scarcity, but i
suppose all that blood made it look like too much hard
work.

When i finally clattered up to my apartment building, Arno was
standing there, leaning against the wall like he was waiting for
someone. He looked at me limping up with my rolling wreck in a
way that made me feel like we'd met before. He seemed weirdly
familiar, like i'd known him for ages, even though i'd never set
eyes on him before that very moment.

It was probably his hair. He had very familiar hair.

"Looks like you've got a bit of trouble there," he said, in that
accent of his. There was no pity or sympathy; it was like it was
only to be expected, all the blood and ruined machinery. He took
his weight off the wall and i stopped my painful limping progress
while he lumbered up to me with his rolling, bow-legged sailor's
gait.

We clearly had something in common: leg issues.

He examined the bike, leaning forward as much as his worn-out
tendons and fragile spine would allow.

What now, i wondered.

I just wanted to get inside my apartment. I was perspiring in a
most unladylike manner from having to walk all that way, and my
thigh was slicker with blood than i was happy for it to be. My
head felt like it was stewing in my helmet, and i could tell just
by their clammy feel that my slicks were wet through with sweat,
revealing much more of the details of my thinly concealed anatomy
than i was prepared for some perfect stranger - however familiar
- to be privy to.

"That is a pretty mess, young lady," he congratulated me. "What
do you know about the master link?"

I looked at him blankly, ready to thank him for his kind interest
and then push my bike the last few metres to its hook, go
upstairs, strip off my soggy, skintight riding slicks and step
into a long, luxurious, muscle-easingly hot vapour.

"On the chain?" he was persisting, pointing with a gnarled and
knotty finger. "The master link on the chain?"

I shook my head, contemplating taking off my helmet to frighten
him away with my shocking helmet-hair. "Knowing things like that
is what mechanics are for, sir. If you'll excuse me..."

He pulled out a knife and i blanched, in spite of the hot sweat i
was in. It was the sort of concealable, closing-bladed knife that
had been outlawed back in the Twenties under some chapter and
verse of the Terrorism and Assault Legislation. The situation had
gone from awkward to shitful in the space of two seconds. My
throat and lungs stopped working as i watched his thick gorilla
fingers deftly pull at the folding parts of the weapon. I tried
to get my eyes to dart about, to find me an escape route, but
mostly i was seeing nothing but the cruel eye-gouging spike that
now rested in his hand.

"Take this," he said in an encouraging, even affable voice, and
offered me the weapon, handle first. When i remained statuesque
with fear, he suggested, "It's not going to hurt you."

Not quite knowing what i was doing, i put out my hand, feeling it
drift away from me, become less a part of my body. And then - by
some uncanny trick of mind transference - i felt the weight of
the weapon vibrating with evil in the fingers that had recently
been mine. It was warm from his pocket.

That warmth made it feel both more and less sinister at the same
time.

"Now," he said, quietly, like i was a horse that might spook,
might rear up and take off with screaming passengers in the
rattling tram behind it. "If you look - here! - you will see that
there is one link, one single spot on the whole chain, where - if
you know what you are doing - you can take control of this
situation."

I examined the chain, the weapon - his weapon - gripped in my
hand, like it was a normal thing to be holding in polite
society.

"It's tiny," he told me, holding up two fingers, slightly apart,
to show just how tiny. "Like this."

"Hang on," i said, plucking up some crazy courage, my voice still
coming from far away, even though it was becoming clear that he
was not going to kill me. "I'll just use my iPocket to find a
mechanic..."

"No!" he burst out, as if i'd just suggested we should, after
all, use the weapon in my hands to go murder a policeman and eat
his liver. "We can," he continued, his voice calmer, "work this
out ourselves."

He talked me through the not-all-that-complex operation of
opening the master link with the spike on his weapon, unjamming
and then rethreading the chain through the
complex-but-not-complicated gears, and moving the derailleur to
allow me the slack to rejoin the master link.

My bike had always just been to me this sleek clockwork of
intermeshed metal. Now i could feel it pliable beneath my
fingers, like a living creature that i was able to heal with my
hands.

I especially liked the way that the derailleur, always so stiff
and intimidating, became loosely compliant and bent to my will,
once i knew what i was doing with it.

I stood back and looked at my repaired bike as if it had sprung
mysteriously up out of the earth. I lifted the rear wheel and
gave the pedals a turn. The chain fed through the metal teeth
without a murmur, and the back wheel spun with a clockwork
tick-tick-tick.

The Mature put out his hand for the weapon, and introduced
himself. "I am Arno," he explained, "Now you no longer need a
mechanic."

This was true, but i was still bleeding. It occurred to me that
he was more concerned about the bike repairs than the me
repairs.

Regardless, he had done me a good turn, so i invited him upstairs
for a cuppa or something, to thank him. He demurred.

"No. I'll... catch you later," he said, which seemed to amuse
him, and then he went to leave, his duty clearly done.

It was when he turned to go that i suddenly felt that pull you
get in the pit of your stomach. The one that ends with you naked
in bed, hot and thrashing. You know the one. I was suddenly
completely convinced that i had to stop this man from leaving my
life, or i would be the poorer for it.

"You don't know anything about dressing a wound, do you?" i
asked, flirting shamelessly, desperate to stop him from going. "I
have a gash that needs some attention."

He looked at my gash undecided, smiled and waved his hand, and
went to continue leaving, like my blood was someone else's
business. But then he changed his mind, stopped leaving, turned
and smiled at me, and came upstairs. A little awkwardly, he
helped me apply a dressing to the wound with his almost useless
fingers. Once i was snugly bandaged (i had to fix it up to stop
it falling off once his back was turned) things got all social.
We talked and talked and talked. He was so charming that i
insisted we meet again, for dinner. We hit it off so well at that
dinner that we started dating pretty much straight away from
then, him taking me to all sorts of places in my own city that
i'd never known existed. Mostly they were old places, of course,
but he seemed to enjoy nothing better than to see me seeing them
for the first time, these ancient places with their tired stones
and worn insides.

He was such a sweet old duffer. I found him utterly irresistible.
So, naturally, things ran along their usual course, and now,
three and a half weeks after that day with the master link, we
were finally having sex.

I took off my knickers and folded them neatly in thirds before
dropping them on the floor. "Ta-da!" i sang, putting my hands on
my hips, crossing my feet at the ankles, and rotating my torso
thirty degrees from straight on. That's the way they instruct you
to stand, in mag-ezines. It makes you look more classically
attractive.

And being naked helps, too.

He regarded me in all my glory with his rheumy eyes, and then he
beckoned me over to him.

I crossed the four steps from my bedside to the chair, oozing as
much vibrant sexuality as i could manage to project, and stood
there before him, again in my ankles-crossed,
thirty-degrees-turned-torso arrangement of assets, the stripy
light from the dusty venetians lying over my undulations like
contour lines.

He looked at me carefully, almost as if he were learning me by
heart.

He reached out with his glove-like hand and put his sausage
fingers on my hip, holding me. With his thumb he stroked that
soft bit of skin between the jut of my hip bone and my delta of
venus.

Then he seemed to remember something, took back his soft, bony
paw, and said, simply, "Now we begin."

I took those four sexuality-oozing steps back across the room to
my brass bed and lay down, waiting for him to start having sex
with me.

"You must first caress your breasts," he instructed. "They are
beautifully shaped, and you need to enjoy their
symmetry..."

So i enjoyed their symmetry for him, and then i "tweaked" my
nipples for him, as he instructed. And then we were finished with
my boobs, and moving on to my pussy.

Which was nice.

Most Matures spend too long on my boobs. For all their supposed
wisdom, most men in their seventies and eighties seem to have
forgotten that boobs are really just for feeding babies and
looking at. Maybe the odd teenaged girl here and there finds
stroking her own boobs an utterly orgasmic turn on, but i
certainly don't. He seemed to know that, and we were paying
attention to the business end of me much sooner than usual, which
i appreciated deeply.

"Your pussy," he lectured, "is a complex system of folds and
layers, all of which are woven with nerve endings. We begin by
stroking the exterior with our fingertips."

So stroke i did.

"We are going to have a full-vulva orgasm," he promised, like a
tour guide, "so you will need to get your whole vulva
involved."

That seemed reasonable. I stroked and stroked until i could
almost hear myself crackling with static electricity. It was
working, all that stroking; i could feel myself getting wetter by
the moment.

"This part of you," he continued in that luscious european accent
that i'd grown to adore in the hundreds of stories he'd told me
in the dozens of coffee shops he'd taken me to, "you stimulate
with your bicycle seat, when you crouch low over the bar to get
your velocity up. Your labia are compressed and rocked side to
side as you fly along, propelled at high speed by the simple
machinery of your own elegant legs..."

This was true, and i was thinking of that sensation of flight,
and that pressure on my cunt, that private knowledge - although
not as private as i thought - that as i shot along the veloway,
suspended above the blurring bitumen by only my palms, toes, and
labia, that i was stimulating myself to the gateway of orgasm. At
his suggestion i stroked my thighs with my other hand, the one
that wasn't caressing my pussy.

I could feel my breath picking up as he talked me through
exciting the nerve endings in my cycle-tuned thigh muscles.

He was connecting the power i feel in my legs when i cycle with
the oscillating frottage of the seat...

I had a feeling i would be thinking about this tomorrow afternoon
on the veloway home as i rocked from side to side.

"Now we slide our finger inside of our outer lips," his voice
announced quietly. "We use our ring finger, and our middle
finger, not our index finger, and we feel the slippery moistness
of the inner lips..."

I'd had to pull away my habitually-selected index finger once
he'd corrected me. No-one had ever made me use those fingers
before, and he was right; it felt a lot better.

"Use your ring finger and middle finger to open your lips," came
the next direction. "Feel the moistness around the opening to
your vagina, and explore your opening with your
fingertips..."

I did as he said, but it felt pretty yucky. Plus, he was using
that corny old Mature word: moistness. Just as i was beginning to
lose my buzz, he told me to keep my fingers where they were, and
to sit up.

"Now you slide those two fingers inside of your opening, and feel
the rough corrugations of your interior passage..."

I wasn't sure what he meant. I just felt wet and slippery inside.
For a split instant i felt like i might even piss myself.

When i dropped my shoulder, i could feel my fingers go in even
further, and i could feel what had to be the front wall of my
cunthole, which was, indeed, corrugated. Or rough, at
least.

"Your other hand, your clitoris," he said simply. "You know what
to do there, i am sure..."

I did know, and i did do it.

For some time he didn't say anything. I kept clitting myself and
feeling these corrugations that i'd just found inside of me.
Orgasm bubbled up from time to time, but then receded again, the
way it does on the veloway. I could feel my fingers starting to
prune up from immersion in my own liquids, and i wanted him to
just take me wherever it was he was taking me. It seemed like it
was going to be an interesting place.

"Press into the corrugations," he said, finally, after all that
silence. "Until it feels ... good..."

This seemed like a rather vague instruction, but it did feel
good. Not fantastic, but good.

"I'm gonna lay down," i told him. He nodded indulgently and i lay
down. I looked over at him, and saw that he was deep in thought,
like he was trying to remember, or perhaps decide, something.
Something important.

"You will find," he said, breaking out of his reverie, "that
there is one place, one single spot amongst the corrugations,
where - if you know what you are doing - you can take control of
this situation."

I closed my eyes and examined the corrugations with my fingers,
feeling about for this spot.

"It's tiny," he told me, and i opened my eyes and looked over at
him to see him holding up two fingers, slightly apart, to show
just how tiny. "Like this."

Then i had to close my eyes again, and open my mouth, and
scream.

I'd found the spot.

My body heaved and jerked in an orgasm that reminded me of the
time as a teenager when i'd hit a curbing and been thrown from my
bike. There was the initial thump of the orgasm arriving, then a
feeling like flying, and then a series of full body blows as i
rolled and bounced through the shockwaves.

I had never come so powerfully before in my life. It was like
Arno knew not only decades and decades of giving women pleasure,
but like he knew decades and decades of giving me, personally and
specifically, pleasure.

As the orgasmic blows continued to thump into me, i thought i saw
through my closed eyes a painfully bright explosion of light. I
opened my eyes to see what was happening, but the light was
gone.

So too, i realised, was Arno.

But my orgasm wasn't stopping for any flashes of light or
disappearing Matures. It continued on its way until it finally
shuddered to a stop. I caught my breath after a few expletives
and several minutes, and i called out to him. Where had he gone?
How could he leave at that moment? What the fuck was he
thinking?

I called out to him again, all sorts of heartfelt endorsements of
his technique at first, and then diplomatic suggestions that it
was only polite to be in the same room as a girl you're making
orgasm, but he still didn't come back into the bedroom.

Where the fuck had he gone?

I let the last of the orgasm twitch its way out of my system,
like an electrical storm diminishing and moving away over the
horizon after blasting steeples and cracking windows. I lay there
in the fading light slotting through the venetians. I waited and
i waited until i started to feel cold.

I stood up and walked over to the chair where i'd last seen him
sitting.

There was a rectangular piece of glass lying there. A rectangular
piece of glass about the size of an iPocket.

I picked it up.

The instant i touched it, it became luminously opaque and the
familiar Apple logo appeared inside the glass.

A message appeared: "Switching user: Welcome back, Julia". I
turned it over in my hand and, for a split second, the back of
the glass had the same message on it, but in reverse. Then it
flipped right way around.

"Welcome back?" i read out loud. How was this welcome back?

The message changed to read, "Voice match confirmed, privacy
access granted" and the glass changed so that it looked as if it
had coloured bubbles trapped inside it.

Coloured bubbles with icons on them.

I realised that it was an iPocket, after all. But it must be a
prototype or something, because it was so different to the
current models. It clearly had that new thing, where two or more
people could sync their iPocket accounts onto each other's
devices, which was frightfully romantic, but i couldn't remember
setting up my account to share with Arno, and that's the sort of
thing i would definitely remember.

When i looked closer, it actually said "iPocket" at the top of
the glass screens. It had the date and time, too, but the time
was wrong and the date was ridiculously fifty years into the
future.

That was the thing about these Generation Y Matures. They were
always on about how they were the original digital natives and
what not, but they still couldn't set the clocks on their
iPockets without help. Maybe it was those fat, useless fingers of
theirs.

Putting aside that the date and time was wrong, i was pretty
impressed with the way the thing could work with no visible
electronics.

And then i heard the voice in my head, and i was really
impressed.

It was telling me that i had some messages, and two overdue
appointments.

As best as i could tell, the sound i was hearing was somehow
coming from the iPocket and through my body to my ears.

Somehow. Without earphones.

I pressed my fingertip onto the glass over the bubble with what i
took to be the new prototype version of the photos icon, and
clusters of images appeared. I pressed on one of these clusters
and the first photo appeared.

It was a photo of me.

I was an old woman, but it was clearly, indisputably me.

I looked terrible. Haggard. Sick. Worn out.

My eyes were mostly socket, and my hair a frosted mess, like i'd
been painting the ceiling in my sleep.

Even my clothes looked tired.

I flicked through the album.

I had an adult child in there, amongst the bubbles. He was in
something that might have been a wheelchair, had it had wheels.
His body was agonisingly deformed and misshapen. He looked as if
he was in constant pain. There was a photo of his thirty-third
birthday, and i was smiling gamely and falsely for the camera,
posed with the cake, my adult child in a rictus of agony trying
to blow out the candles.

I flicked through album after album, putting the pieces
together.

They were mostly photos of me and my tortured, deformed child,
these pieces, along with some occasional snaps of my husband and
his mechanics' shop.

With just the slightest of flicks of my index finger - the one i
had been instructed to not use in frigging myself - i could
follow the entire arc of my future life.

I married Arno, we worked hard together to build up his business,
i had my monstrous child, and then everything descended into a
long, dark, creeping misery.

That was as far as the photos took me. I guessed that if i could
access Arno's messages and appointments, that i'd know how he had
come back through time, for the chance to make it all go
away.

I imagined that Virgin had added time travel to space flight,
somewhere up there in the future.

I stood naked in my bedroom, no light on except for the glowing
glass i held in my hand, and i let what i'd seen sink in.

Everything made sense, despite it all being quite, quite
impossible. A few final pieces had to go into the mosaic, though,
and i could provide them myself.

I picked up my own iPocket and held it up, searching around me
through the augmentisphere for the mechanic's shop where Arno
worked. I found it pretty easily. It was the one i was going to
take my broken bike to that first day we'd met.

It was less than two kilometres away. It took me longer to roll
on my riding slicks than it took me to ride there.

He was gorgeous, at least as gorgeous as in the photos.

The early photos, that is, until life with haggard me and our
sideshow spawn beat him into rueful resignation.

There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes. We had, after
all, never met.

He was a different Arno to the one who had come back through
time, of course. Since we hadn't met that day when we were
supposed to. He'd made sure of that.

He was, for one thing, engaged.

Within thirty seconds of walking into his shop, i'd asked him out
for coffee, as is the way with we few young people left on Earth.
He laughed, good naturedly. He'd met a girl a month and a half
ago, and things had just clicked. He explained this with the
openness of the newly in love as he indulgently continued to
tinker with my perfectly functioning bike, looking for the vague
"thing" that i was lying was wrong with it.

"Really," he grinned in that european accent of his, "i
appreciate the compliment, but Hilary is carrying my child, so
coffee is out of the question."

He finished pretending to work on my bike, and handed it back to
me.

There was nothing for him to fix. Not now.

I wished him all the best with the child, fitted the bikeseat to
my still-humming, post-orgasmic vulva, and rode home.

So, haggard me and my demon issue were gone, never to be. Or not
that particular demon issue, anyway. I made a mental note to get
my genes checked out before i fucked anyone who could manage an
actual erection, to see if it was some hidden horror in my DNA
that had caused the poor twisted being i had spent an alternative
lifetime looking after.

I wasn't so sure that i would have done what Arno had done. I can
understand a man flushing away a life like that, but i found
myself wondering about that no-more-to-be child of mine...

I was looking forward to reading through the messages and
appointments on alternative-future-Julia's iPocket, hoping
against hope that she'd kept some sort of diary on it. That would
make for some interesting reading.

But, thanks to alternative-future-Arno, i'd just learnt a new
trick, and i had me some masturbation to do first.